Voicing Dissent

The Ethics and Epistemology of Making Disagreement Public

Casey Rebecca Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351721561
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Disagreement is, for better or worse, pervasive in our society. Not only do we form beliefs that differ from those around us, but increasingly we have platforms and opportunities to voice those disagreements and make them public. In light of the public nature of many of our most important disagreements, a key question emerges: How does public disagreement affect what we know?

This volume collects original essays from a number of prominent scholars—including Catherine Elgin, Sanford Goldberg, Jennifer Lackey, Michael Patrick Lynch, and Duncan Pritchard, among others—to address this question in its diverse forms. The book is organized by thematic sections, in which individual chapters address the epistemic, ethical, and political dimensions of dissent. The individual contributions address important issues such as the value of disagreement, the nature of conversational disagreement, when dissent is epistemically rational, when one is obligated to voice disagreement or to object, the relation of silence and resistance to dissent, and when political dissent is justified. Voicing Dissent offers a new approach to the study of disagreement that will appeal to social epistemologists and ethicists interested in this growing area of epistemology.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Reasonable Disagreement
• 2 Disagreements, of Beliefs and Otherwise
• 3 Dissent: Ethics and Epistemology
• 4 Dissent: Good, Bad, and Reasonable
• 5 Silence and Objecting
• 6 For the Sake of Argument: The Nature and Extent of Our Obligation to Voice Disagreement
• 7 Eloquent Silences: Silence and Dissent
• 8 Epistemic Arrogance and the Value of Political Dissent
• 9 Emancipatory Political Dissent in Practice: Insights From Social Theory
• 10 Speaking and Listening to Acts of Political Dissent
• 11 Responding to Harmful Speech: The More Speech Response, Counter Speech, and the Complexity of Language Use
• Contributors
• Index